Keridiana Chez: Of Wolves and Women

Keridiana Chez met with us to discuss her article in the Victorian Review 38.1, spring 2012 issue, “‘You Can’t Trust Wolves No More Nor Women’: Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Ms. Chez’s article addresses the “problematic husband-wife and master-pet relations” (89) in the novel. She examines English women and their affection for their pets and this relationship’s effect on marital life. “The structural positioning of women and dogs is surprisingly similar,” she noted in her discussion with  us, “and the treatment of rabid dogs mimics the way that men were supposed to treat the women that they loved as well.” English women and their “chiens de luxe” are cast in the same light, suggesting that domesticated women, like domesticated dogs, are public and private hazards. As she asserts in the Victorian Review, idle women are spoiled, useless, and “deceptively docile household member[s]” (77). Furthermore, in Dracula, the rabid pet wolf Bersicker, and other pets, are presented as being highly susceptible to rabies, and women, as keepers of these luxurious pets, are more likely than men to be bitten and infected with rabies, or worse, vampirism.

Keridiana Chez

Keridiana Chez is a PhD candidate working on her dissertation, “The Affective Uses of Dogs: Pet-Keeping in Nineteenth-Century England and America,” at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is an alumnus of the New York University School of Law and the State University of New York at Binghamton.